Social care costs consume more than a third of council budgets

Funding for social care now makes up 37.8% of council budgets, with more than three quarters of authorities worried about their ability to meet the statutory duty to ensure care market stability, according to a survey.

The stark figures were released this week by the Association for the Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) in its annual survey of local authorities with social care responsibilities.

It revealed widespread concerns about the impact of funding reductions on the care market, with three quarters of councils believing providers will experience financial difficulties over the coming year.

According to the survey, 48 councils have seen home care companies close or cease trading within the last six months, while 44 authorities had contracts affecting 2,679 people receiving care handed back by providers.

Glen Garrod, president of ADASS, said: “It is of serious concern that we have such a fragile social care market, where 48 councils across the country have seen care providers close or cease to trade in the last six months.

“This means that people do not have the choice over the care that they should have and the potential to transform lives is being lost.”

Garrod urged the government to ensure emergency funding is sustained until the implementation of the forthcoming social care green paper.

He added that the green paper must ensure that funding for social care needs becomes a “reality not an aspiration”.

The ADASS survey found that 92% of councils who have increased precepts to cover social care costs said they were doing so just to keep pace with demographic pressures.

In addition, recruitment and retention of staff are significant worries for social care directors.

The ability to increase salaries for social care staff — among the lowest paid in the economy — was seen as the most important factor in tackling recruitment and retention issues, ADASS said.

Izzi Seccombe, chair of the Local Government Association’s community wellbeing board, said the report was further evidence of the crisis in adult social care funding.

“Councils and providers are doing all they can to help ensure older and disabled people receive high quality care,” she said, “but unless immediate action is taken to tackle increasingly overstretched council budgets, the adult social care tipping point, which we have long warned about, will be breached and councils risk not being able to fulfil their statutory duty under the Care Act.

“Government needs to address immediate pressures impacting on the system today and plug the funding gap facing adult social care, which is set to exceed £2bn by 2020, and ensure its green paper will deliver reforms to future-proof the long-term sustainability of adult social care.”

She said that the funding crisis was putting pressure on an increasingly fragile provider market and placing a strain on informal carers and an over-stretched workforce.

David Williams, spokesman for health and social care at the County Councils Network, and leader of Hertfordshire County Council, called on the government’s green paper to give councils equal status to the NHS, and offer extra resources in the next Comprehensive Spending Review.

“Faced with a potent mixture of rising demand and inadequate funding, we will do all we can to transform services and effectively manage our budgets but as the survey shows, we have little option but to raise charges in order to protect services for those people with the greatest level of need,” he said.

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